Mixed Mental Arts

As a professor of psychology at UC Berkley and the founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, Dacher Keltner studies how we negotiate our relationships with others. After having Robert Greene, the author of The 48 Laws of Power on the show, we came across an article on The Greater Good’s website by Keltner refuting the model of power advocated in The 48 Laws of Power. Although the popular culture believes that power is obtained through lying, cheating and manipulation research shows that that Machiavellian approach tends to fail in mainstream American society. In this episode, Professor Keltner tells us exactly what the research shows us about power. How power is acquired? Do manipulators succeed over the long run? How does acquiring power affect people’s brains? Interestingly, the sort of power strategies that Machiavelli described do work in societies where trust has been destroyed like the incredibly violent world of 15th Century Italy where Machiavelli wrote. Is it any wonder that some